A tool that facilitates computer monitoring has existed for quite some time, such as, for example, the IBM mainframe System Monitoring Facility (SMF) application. Using SMF, for example, resource usage is typically gathered by turning on a monitoring process which collects performance information for all activities on that system. At the end of the day, the records that have been captured are then analyzed and reported on via a batch process. This non-real time data collection is illustrated for example, in FIG. 1. In this prior approach, there is little flexibility in deciding what program is related to which application in a real time basis other than by creating batch reporting jobs at some later time, such as at the end of the day.